Posted
by
BeauHDon Tuesday May 17, 2016 @10:30PM
from the karma-is-a-bitch dept.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Rightscorp, the copyright trolls whose business model was convincing ISPs to freeze their customers' Internet access in response to unsubstantiated copyright accusations, and then ransom those connections back for $20 each, will be out of money by the end of this quarter. Despite a massive courtroom win against Cox Cable in 2015 (and a counterbalancing gigantic fine for its robocalls), the company couldn't win a technology cat-and-mouse game against its prey -- the wily file-sharers who switched to VPNs and other anonymizing technologies. For the moment, the company is teetering on the brink of financial collapse. It raised $500,000 on February 22, the company reported, but it needs another $1 million to stay afloat. It has only enough cash on hand to continue "into the second quarter of 2016," according to the company's latest financial report.

The thing is the patents and copyrights these companies hold don't go away when the company dies. Like Bilbo's ring these things just go to the next person that finds them irresistible and the cycle starts over. Even if some large company, say microsoft, scoops them up in the name of protecting themselves, eventually it becomes a cudgel again.

I live in downtown Seattle and don't have DSL available so I use ISDN. I wasn't even connected at the time when CenturyLink sent a DMCA from CEG TEK. They know it since they bill per minute. Telco billing is well known for being very accurate.

In the good old days when I was a lad working with IBM mainframes (ok they weren't good but they were old) there was this crazy idea that error messages were documented with reasons why they occur. In this brave new world this is too much trouble and you either have to spend hours to days figuring out what some cryptic phrase means or you can Google it and see if someone else has had the problem. I'm guessing you either get as much time as you need on your projects or else have been working on the same technology for a long time.

Tore me apart? You have YET to actually prove me wrong on anything. What is your malfunction? What makes you think you ever are right when everyone around you comments about how wrong you always are?

You will notice, in that link you kindly provide that not a single one of your points actually hit home. I have refuted every one of them, and you have yet to actually come up with a single issue with something I have said. Keep tilting at those windmills Quixote.

" You need to know how to research anytime you are dealing with something new."

Funny you say that when, lo and behold, I've been a research director.

You seem to know nothing about me. Try again when you actually do. I consult on everything from programming (when I'm not making my own game) to mining (when I'm not working the four mines I own) to horticultural consultation (when I'm not growing the best medicinal cannabis in SoCal) to remote development (again, when I'm not programming my own game.)

Is this the case that Seattle, of all places, has Internet connections straight out of the 1990s? Christ, the ISP I was working at in the dark ages switched from ISDN to a T1 back around 1999, and I'm a few hundred miles north in BC.

In the US most ISDN service was terminated to an PRI T1. That hooked into a modem bank that would answer both ISDN and 56K calls. By that point the ISDN modems where smart enough to be able to use both 64K channels as a pair bond. It would utilize two modems at the NOC.

It was also pretty common for us to order channelized T1s for 56K applications. You could get one extra modem per T1, but we would lose the ability to get real time ANI data and ISDN.

That's why upgrade projects exist, to upgrade. It's also why the telecoms were given billions to upgrade their networks by the government, instead we got the telecom fueled tech bubble. Take a look around, very few telecoms left, their profits have plummeted (the giveaways ended) But wow were times good in the 90s, and we got very little for the billions invested.

Because that's the only thing that makes sense with their underhanded practices. Anyone with half a clue would never put his money or personal affects behind something like that, because these scammers are basically setting themselves up for a huge lawsuit. What they do is fling poop and see what sticks and how far they can take it before they get slapped left and right. And surprisingly enough, so far there has been rather little slapping.

I fully expect this to be some kind of test balloon, with the rights holder themselves surprised it stayed afloat this long. The idea was to create a shell that goes about and violates any and all limitations of copyright law to see what can be done before someone cries bloody murder. Once the company gets countersued and there is a judge with enough sanity left to actually dock them the fine they deserve, the shell goes 'poof' and the next one emerges.

That's likely also why nobody ever bothered to drag them to court over their practices, knowing that it is futile, even if you win you'll be left with the expenses and nothing to compensate it. That shell has no money whatsoever. Never had, never will. Any money they actually make (aside of the 20 bucks pebbles) will instantly leave that husk.

Such constructs are very useful when you want to ignore laws, to say the least...

I know I'm late for the discussion, but I thought I'd add something that might show another side to what is mostly a bunch of generalizations.

One copyright owner hired a firm I worked for to handle filesharing litigation for a couple of movies in a particular judicial district. We took the work on the condition that we could keep everything beyond reproach ethically, and the copyright owner agreed. They put it this way: we know our copyright is being infringed and this is the only way to do anything about